


Surviving

by Phlogistics



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Canon Compliant, Fix-It, Introspection, M/M, Post DoFP, Post X-3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-24
Updated: 2014-05-24
Packaged: 2018-01-26 08:17:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1681286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phlogistics/pseuds/Phlogistics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik's life very nearly improved when the world ended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Surviving

Erik's life very nearly improved when the world ended.

Without his powers or a purpose, the months after Jean’s death had provided Erik with an excellent opportunity to dwell on his many failures. As much as Erik considered himself a thoughtful person, he didn't care much for the incessant introspection. He mourned Charles as much as he would allow himself to, staving off the grief with all the self-righteous anger as he could muster. He reminded himself repeatedly that he had fought against both the humans and Charles’s band of do-gooders for years, knowing that their fight would end with the destruction of one or the other. Mutant superiority had to be recognized and sustained for them to ever be safe, and violence was the only language the humans were able to understand. That belief, unshakable and _true_ , had driven him for decades.

Yet the thought always returned: hadn’t his methods proved to be as pathetically ineffective as Charles’s soft-hearted diplomacy?  For all the suffering he had willingly wrought, what had he achieved? Mutantkind had still lined up to be destroyed when the “cure” was put out, and its weaponization had hardly pinged as a scandal in the most liberal news media. However their fates would eventually play out—and he had felt little optimism for their chances, even before the Sentinel program revealed itself in all its bloody glory—neither he nor Charles would be around to see it. It stung, to realize he had thrown away the few people he cared for such meager accomplishments. He had even abandoned Mystique, his truest ally, when she was no longer one of them, only to have his own abilities stolen. A part of him saw the sort of karmic justice in it, but he wasn’t able to view his own loss dispassionately enough to appreciate it.

He played chess in the park a few days a week, eschewing the few opponents who volunteered in order to play against a phantom whose strategies he still remembered. Erik took the first move.

He kept up his routine for three months, moving between low-class hotels where he could pay in cash and keep to himself without raising any eyebrows, doing little besides indulging in self-loathing and vainly trying to grasp at metal tokens. Sometimes he thought he could feel them or that he’d seen one twitch, but when the results couldn’t be repeated he passed it off as nothing but a depressed old man’s wishful thinking. It wasn’t until a chess piece finally tumbled that a light seemed to open up before him. His mission may have failed, but perhaps he could at least have this back. The chess games relocated to his motel room, morphing into exhausting tests of his slowly returning abilities.

It was incredibly frustrating, struggling to move small objects as he hadn’t since Shaw’s tortuous instructions. It felt weak in a way even his revolting humanness hadn’t. He found himself reaching back for words of encouragement he’d nearly forgotten— _“Between rage and serenity”,_ the thrill of moving a satellite, and the excitement of two young men not yet fully cognizant of what the future had in store for them. The disgusting nostalgia of it all moved him to tears more times than he cared to admit, Charles’s memory aching more deeply than it ever had now that even his condescending lectures were beyond Erik.

He lived that way for another year, exhausting his tenuous support system and struggling to retrain himself. The public had just begun to catch wind of the serum’s failure, with several spectacular instances of reemerging abilities catapulting mutant issues back into the forefront of public eye, when the Sentinel program first began to be marketed to the public. Erik had no illusions as to the supposed benevolence of the program, but with the Brotherhood collapsed and his own powers far from fully returned, there was little he could do to prevent its implementation. Several failed attempts to disrupt the machines’ production and a pro-mutant rally that ended in massacre were all he could muster, and their dismal endings left him with little hope. Diplomatic maneuvering by Beast at the UN had no significant effect, nor did a public relations campaign engineered by Storm. On a day Erik felt particularly useless, he wrote a disgruntled letter to his senator asking that federal support for the project be cut, signed by an old alias he was willing to burn. It seemed an appropriately hopeless way to express himself.

The world had already begun to end when he heard Charles’s voice again.

Years later, in the wasteland left in the Sentinels’ wake, he had nearly forgiven Charles for failing to broadcast his miraculous return from the dead sooner. He understood why Charles had believed that a reunion between the two of them would not have gone well before the necessity of the apocalypse united them. There was even a significant part of him that was grateful for Charles’s decision to stay out of his head, though checking up on Erik would’ve allowed him to see how wrongheaded that belief was. That kind of respect was not something he probably deserved, after what he had put Charles through.

But he couldn't help but wish that they’d had a bit more time. Watching his worst nightmares come true had not been made better by having Charles by his side, but it offered its own kind of pleasures, however distorted. Their nightly chess games started up again after only a few awkward days, and once insurmountable ideological rifts become smaller and calmer, intellectualized into mostly harmless debates between old friends. As they rediscovered each other, there were whispered affections and stolen moments between them more befitting of men much younger than they, a glimpse into the kind of lives they could’ve led had they chosen different paths. Erik did his best to ignore his regrets and his spite towards the world collapsing around them that had made mockery of the long rift between them. Better to appreciate their stolen time for what it was.

Still, sometimes his mind wandered to a time when they were younger and less weary. “What pigheaded fools we were, Charles,” he murmured.

Charles chuckled. “As though we aren’t still. Though perhaps out of necessity more than before,” he said with a rueful smile. “However, I think it may be best to foolishly cling to our hope.”

They saved the few they could, and continued to fight. The end of the world ended up being rather boring, for the most part, once the background of despair and terror had become normalized. Direct confrontations with the Sentinels were deliberately kept to a minimum, as their already depleted forces couldn’t afford to sustain more casualties. They ran, hid, and subsisted, scattering themselves across the world and keeping themselves as far as possible from the few human metropolises still functioning.

A real chance to fix things was unexpected, when it came. Kitty’s mutation was incredible, and if they maneuvered themselves correctly, all of the pain their mistakes had brought could be undone within a few days. The hours Erik and Charles dedicated to examining their failures were suddenly more than exercises in self-pity; they knew what must be done. Having to leave things to Logan was unexpected and less than ideal, in Erik’s opinion—though Charles had plenty of faith in the man, and he had always proved decent enough at foiling Erik’s schemes—but it was far from enough of a hiccup to make Erik less excited about their plans.

Despite maintaining a perfectly calm demeanor, he knew Charles could feel his tense anticipation. They were putting themselves at risk by staying in one location for so long, but there was nowhere safer for them to be and moving wasn’t an option. And if all went as it should, as Erik scarcely believed it could, none of these risks would be something they’d ever have been forced into anyway. If he died here, it hopefully would’t actually matter.

“What a dreary thought,” Charles remarked.

Erik rolled his eyes. “Sometimes I wonder whatever convinced me to give such a nag permission to live in my head,” he said. “I thought it was rather uplifting, knowing that this may give me some form of immortality. Defeating death and all that.”

“I wouldn’t precisely consider it immortality,” Charles said. “Rewriting this time may be more of a mercy killing, ending it before it can cause any more pain.”

“I think that’s quite a bit drearier, Charles.”

He laughed. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.” He grasped Erik’s hand briefly, squeezing. “They’re ready now. We wouldn’t want to keep the past waiting.”

Rolling his eyes, Erik groused, “You’re enjoying this far too much, you know. These are very serious matters about which you should be ashamed to be joking.” Charles ignored him, the glint in his eye teasing and irreverent. Erik's heart clenched, and he tried to ignore the urge to make any embarrassing declarations about not wanting to spend the end of the world with anyone else.

They quickly regrouped with the others, and the mood immediately became more solemn. The actual process was, for them, not particularly eventful. Watching Logan’s unmoving body became boring quickly, but leaving for any length of time was entirely out of the question, so they stayed put, only leaving in short shifts to bring back food or grab a quick nap. Kitty never moved from her place, even after Logan lashed out, growing visibly more exhausted as time passed. Erik was grimly impressed at the strength this broken world instilled in her.

The arrival of the Sentinels was very nearly a relief from the tension of their vigil. The numbers approaching were less so, and Erik grimly considered that his earlier musing may become a reality. Charles said that they need more time—he had seen a vision of his younger self, and things had not yet been put right. So if it was time they need, it was time he would give them.

At first, the fight went better than he’d hoped it would. He felt a pang of regret in destroying their jet, but one way or the other no one was going to be needing the Blackbird anymore. But the Sentinels rallied themselves, and the piece of shrapnel that got buried in his side made him dizzy with pain and blood loss. He wasn't sure if yanking it out made things better or worse, but he pulled himself together enough to create a barrier from the scraps of the Blackbird. Blink got him inside, which at least spared his from watching too many more mutants slaughtered before he died. He would have thanked her, if he'd thought she had a chance of surviving.

He couldn’t really think straight anymore, but he tried to communicate to Charles their situation. Exhausted, he slumped against a wall, clutching his side and breathing heavily. He really was going to die here, he thought, and he felt Charles’s alarmed presence in his mind, though of course he still looked as calmly commanding as he ever had. The old fool. “All those years wasted fighting each other, Charles,” he says. “What I wouldn’t give for a precious few of them back.”

He held Charles’s hand at tightly as he could manage, Charles’s words whispering in his mind, _I swear I will give that to us. We will survive this._  The words brought less comfort than they once could have, backed by the sound of the Sentinels crashing through his barrier and Bobby's screams. The Sentinels were upon them momentarily, but as their monstrous faces opened up, Erik's pain and awareness faded slightly, and he would have reprimanded Charles for so pointless a gesture if he could've organize his thoughts enough to

 

\-------

 

“Erik,” Charles repeated. “This is foolishness.”

“No,” he retorted, “foolishness is your insistence on Sunday brunch, but unwavering hatred of mimosas. There’s no point to a brunch without mimosas. “

“What are you afraid of? I’m sure Logan has a lot of very interesting stories to tell, and there’s no point in hiding from a time that never happened. Besides, I think we both owe him a lot of thanks,” Charles said pointedly. “Helping him to readjust to our future is the least we can do for him.”

Erik glared. “I can’t say I’m particularly grateful. I don’t fully approve of the state he left things in. He was meant to be alleviating the world’s suffering, wasn’t he? He did a rather poor job of it.”

“Just because he didn’t have time to alleviate _your_ suffering doesn’t mean he didn’t save us all,” Charles said. “I think you were somewhat out of the scope of his mission.” He smiled, grasping Erik’s hand between his. “Besides, I think we managed rather well without him.”

Erik merely huffed.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in a long spurt in the aftermath of me being destroyed by my Days of Future Past feelings. All mistakes are my own, and please, feel free to point them out so that I can fix them. Hopefully somebody enjoyed this! And even more hopefully, this fandom will blow up again and we'll all have a lot more reading options. XD
> 
> note: edited slightly upon a second viewing to increase compatibility with canon


End file.
